Tag Archives: Kathryn Schulz

When I embarked on this month of daily, rapidly written blog posts, I knew my tolerance for typos and other errors would be sorely tested. And indeed, yesterday I committed one of the homophonically confused errors I’ve made since the beginning of my publishing career, writing “died-in-the-wool” rather than “dyed.” Once I might have been upset by the discovery of my mistake, but my recent reading has persuaded me that a few errors now and then, once recognized, can be good for both readers and writers.

In this morning’s Los Angeles Times, the editors published a note under the headline “Didn’t anyone edit this?” As the paper’s “reader representative” Dierdre Edgar wrote, “When readers write in about errors, it shows they care, and that’s a good thing.” While there are other ways of getting readers to interact with you, the occasional mistake can be good for a writer’s engagement with readers.

But there’s a better reason for writers not to feel too bad when realized they’ve goofed: It’s a valuable learning experience. I’ll leave the last word on this to Kathryn Schulz, a writer I discovered only yesterday through a wonderfully written New York Timesreview of Haruki Marukami’s new novel 1Q84. In her book, On Being Wrong, Schulz eloquently explains why the occasional error is not only tolerable, but beneficial:

Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change.